Overview of Hindu metaphysics

You are the universe, observing yourself: and more specifically, you (consciousness) are the most fundamental reality, your sense that you, individually are conscious separate from all other beings and matter (ahaṃkāra) etc are only a result of the specific nature of how Brahman manifests itself (i.e. you can only observe your own memory, not other people’s etc).

This is quite promising and basically correct, but is a bit vague. In particular, it leaves open the question of what “how Brahman manifests itself” is. Advaita typically models Brahman as completely nirguṇa, and all specific facts about the physical universe and your individuality as completely illusory (Māyā), but this seems to just invert the question of “Why does consciousness exist?” to “Why do all the specific material attributes of the world exist?”

If Brahman were totally nirguṇa and that was all there was to the world, it would be śūnya: none of our observed reality would exist. Sure, you can talk all you want about how the ultimate goal is to forget all that observed reality and just focus on Brahman, but clearly this observed reality is an actual phenomenon that needs to be explained: why is this the observed reality, rather than anything else?

Śiva (=Brahman) is the universal consciousness, and Śakti (no longer mere Māyā) is that consciousness actively computing reality, i.e. the physical universe. One specific analogy given is that of the sea and its waves, i.e. Śiva is “pure” consciousness while Śakti is the specific patterns or information that correspond to the real world; though in other places it looks more like Śiva and Śakti are computation and physics respectively, and are both equivalent views of the same reality.

[@Jakhar_ankit_ was the one to point out that it’s specifically Paramādvaita that is computationalist, not really Advaita as a whole as I had thought.]

Brahman is a multi-agent system comprised of all the individual ātmans, just like you are comprised of cells, or the economy is comprised of people. However we have a holistic rather than a reductionist view of the multi-agent system.

Much like Paramādvaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita also rejects the notion that Brahman is nirguṇa, for similar reasons. However, its answer is to say that Brahman (here visualized as Viṣṇu) possesses only “good” attributes like infinite knowledge and strength and mercy, and all the bad attributes of individual souls are due to their incompleteness. One may compare this to the famous verses in the Bhagavad Gītā where Kṛṣṇa says “Among gods I am Indra, among mountains I am Meru, among birds I am Garuḍa” etc.

This latter tenet is something I’m not convinced of. I would say that this exemplarism (as well as the resulting conclusion is that the goal is to have your ātman reach Vaikuṇṭha and be in eternal service of Brahman/Viṣṇu) is a borrowing from popular theism (which would later be formalized as Dvaita).

[It should also be noted that the monism or panentheism of the Advaita schools should not be confused with panpsychism, where consciousness is viewed as an inherent microscopic property of matter, rather than linked to its interactions and dynamics. I would actually say panpsychism is equivalent to a dualistic philosophy, and is basically Jainism, but both would disagree.]

Human brains and bodies can run as perfect philosophical zombies, composed entirely of matter (Prakṛti). But consciousness exists (for we observe that it exists). Thus consciousness (Puruṣa) must be an entirely passive/static observer, enjoying the dance of Prakṛti but with no effect on it.

This is similar to Descartes’s dualism, except a bit less wrong because it doesn’t randomly claim that philosophical zombies would be slightly less intelligent or agentic or whatever. Still, it is basically non-explanatory of consciousness, like asserting heat is a substance called phlogiston.

Īśvara is a special, formless, Puruṣa who has never been tangled up with matter; a perfect reference point of pure consciousness to meditate on to also attain mokṣa.

This is similar to the Buddhists’ view of Buddha, except Buddha was not “eternal” like Īśvara but instead had to seek liberation himself. And the Buddhists do not actually have a model for what this liberated state is, since they do not believe in either Brahman or Puruṣa. In general I view their philosophy as comprised of incoherent and haphazard borrowings from Hinduism (as well as from Jainism or an earlier common śramaṇic base) with a bunch of wordceling put in between.

Brahman (usually seen as Viṣṇu or Śiva) is a completely separate creator god who designed the universe.

Nyāya is a school of epistemology and formal logic: what are the valid ways of knowing (pramāṇa)? What is valid logic and inference? What are the rules of debate? Vaiśeṣika asserts that the universe is comprised of atoms which form bonds and structures to comprise a zoo of the various substances seen in the world.

If N-V “knew their place” and limited their claims to the material world, they would have no contradiction with Advaita or any of the other darśanas. However, they sought to explain consciousness with the same “atomistic” method, asserting that it is the result of the mixing of four substances (soul, mind, senses and the perceived object). Thus they did not see consciousness as fundamental: instead, the noumenal world was fundamental and consciousness was just a material property that emerged from certain “chemical interactions”.

N-V did not initially believe in/require Īśvara, but in medieval times became the strongest defenders of the idea. Their arguments (specifically that of Udayana) were:

1. Matter does not spontaneously arrange itself into structure, like clay does not spontaneously arrange itself into a clay pot.
2. Calculating karma for every soul in the world (and physical effects in general) is a complex task that requires an intelligent being.
3. Human knowledge must have been passed down from a “first teacher”. Even if you learn things from observation etc, there must be some prior knowledge of how to even internalize this new information.

One may note that all of these arguments have an “entropic” flavour, i.e. “the universe contains order, thus there must be an external source of energy/information into it”.

Dvaita also accepts the N-V view of Īśvara, but rejects its view of consciousness, and instead regards Īśvara as synonymous with Brahman.

The Advaita (including Paramādvaita and Viśiṣṭādvaita) critique of this is not to reject this entropic argument (we are quite happy to say that Brahman is this “cause” of the world). Rather, they reject the proposition that Brahman is only the “efficient cause” (i.e. creator) of the world, and that the “material cause” (i.e. the raw material) is some completely separate “Prakṛti”.

In my post “The early development of Indian philosophy”, I stated that there were two basic roots of Indian philosophy: intellectual speculation on the nature of consciousness (jñānakāṇḍa) and exegesis of Vedic ritual (karmakāṇḍa).

One way to interpret the Vedas was a philosophical guide, often via analogies e.g. the famous “chariot analogy”. This is Uttara-mīmāṃsā, which takes us back to jñānakāṇḍa/Vedānta.

The other way to interpret it is as an explicit ritual manual. This is Pūrva-mīmāṃsā, which holds that

(a) The authority of the Veda is only in prescribing ritual actions. Any other claim in the Veda is only an “auxillary” claim to make a broader point, and does not hold authority over observation and inference, the pramāṇas for the material world. (Note that Vedānta states the same.)

(b) Ritual and its fruits are physical laws followed by the universe, and not administered by intelligent gods.

[In fact, while jñānakāṇḍa motivates the development of philosopy, karmakāṇḍa was responsible for both philosophy and the Vedāṅga: auxillary disciplines such as linguistics, geometry and astronomy developed to better understand the Vedas and perform Vedic ritual, and thus Indian science itself.]

The self is just a mixture of various elements (body, feeling, perception, personality, consciousness) so it’s not real.

[as opposed to Advaita which says the self is a universal Brahman obscured by various physical limitations]

More precisely, they are composed of minimal infinitesimal elements called “dharmas” (which unlike the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika atoms, are momentary, i.e. they are also atomic in time).

But do those dharmas themselves exist? Or is it dharmas all the way down? (similar to the question in classical theism of whether there are gods all the way up)

Yes; we reject self and Brahman and all the finite things, but we still need some atomic units of causal explanation.

AND in fact, all dharmās (at all points in time) always exist, they are just causally connected in a way that gives the illusion of time.

While Hindu philosophy in general was also broadly positivist (the epistemological position that perception and inference are the ways of knowing), Buddhist reductionism stemmed from a “radical positivist” vibe (even though not yet formalized), positing that whatever isn’t completely materially seen isn’t real at all. Thus “patterns” in matter like self and Brahman weren’t real.

Sautrāntikas took this radical positivism to the next level. This meant:

• while the external (noumenal) world is real, we only perceive our own mental representations. So consciousness is quite fundamental/important. [Surprisingly they did not take the obvious next step to claim the noumenal world isn’t real at all.]
• the Sarvāstivādins are wrong: only the present is real.

You can see the start of convergence to Hinduism here: the fundamental position of consciousness, and the formalization of the pramāṇas/epistemology as in the Hindu darśanas.

[BTW I was curious: if Sarvāstivāda is eternalist and Sautrāntika is presentist, is there a no-futurist school in Indian philosophy? There is Vibhajyavāda, the philosophical precursor to Theravāda Buddhism, which states that the future does not exist, but is a bit weird about the past: it states that only the past dharmas which “haven’t yet been karmically accounted for” exist, while the others are gone. Eventually Theravāda just accepted presentism.]

Now we take that “obvious next step” from Śautrāntika: the external/noumenal world isn’t real, only consciousness is real. They clarify this in three levels of understanding of the noumenal world:

Parikalpita-svabhāva: “I, the subject, am seeing an independent object out there.” [This is regarded as an illusion.]

Paratantra-svabhāva: There are stable, lawful patterns of experience. The object in front of me is not my individual fantasy, but a structured cognitive appearance arising from causal relationship between dharmas etc. [This is regarded as “conventionally” real, i.e. is a useful concept in the real world.]

Pariniṣpanna-svabhāva: The subject-object structure of experience is itself generated within consciousness. [This is regarded as the ultimate truth.]

This is pretty much just screaming for Advaita at this point. If the noumenal world isn’t real, but there are stable patterns of experience shared across minds, and these experiences are themselves generated by consciousness …

If you’ve studied math at some level of abstraction, you will realize that the meaning of stuff fundamentally comes from its relationship to other things. It doesn’t matter whether you define the imaginary unit i as a field extension R[x²+1] or as the matrix [0 1; -1 0], they are fundamentally the same. The way the natural numbers are defined in ZFC would horrify a toddler (0 = {}, 1 = {{}}, 2 = {{},{{}}}, 3 = {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}, ... but it works exactly the same as how you would expect.)

[The formal statement of this in category theory is the Yoneda lemma.]

If you build a physical theory out of some momentary infinitesimal atoms (dharmas), then this also applies to these dharmas. It doesn’t matter how you describe these individual dharmas: all of its real, observable properties arise from its dependency/relationship with other dharmas. All observable phenomenon arise from how they are connected and interact with each other.

So these infinitesimals are themselves fundamentally “empty”: reality is an emergent phenomenon of the superstructure formed by the interactions of these infinitesimals.

Now the Madhyamakas take this to say: there is a “conventional reality” (things that are said to exist because they are useful) and an “ultimate reality” (which is śūnyata, nothingness at all). E.g. the concept of a chariot is useful, but if you reductively break it down into parts you do not find a chariot-essence.

But the correct inference to make here would be that this “conventional reality”: the universe, the superstructure that arises from all the dharmas, Brahman, is the Ultimate Reality because that is the only thing that has any informational content at all! The fact that the individual “essences” are empty precisely means that the exact physical substrate that the computation works with, is māya: just how this computation feels like from the inside.